I don't remember who first introduced me to Lira's music. Maybe, I introduced myself to it while getting content for Museke.com. I do know that I've been a fan of her and her music from day one. I also remember my bestie Phelele used to talk about how beautiful Lira was. Real African music connoisseurs would say the same about her music. Through dealing with various artistes as part of Museke, I got to know Lira better and even interviewed her. It was a Q&A (online) one, I didn't meet her in person. Last week, I did meet her in person for the first time. How that happened is a story I wish to tell. :-)

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After a successful couple of days of the SHAPE Africa conference, various Global Shapers attended a jazz musical concert at the Nedbank Auditorium in Cape Town. I was hoping to see a famous South African musician perform. Yvonne Chaka Chaka was there. No, she didn't perform, she was in the audience like us. She's also a member of the World Economic Forum. We were all attending Ilizwi, a musical. South Africans are such great singers and I always said that I wanted to find myself singing in the streets of Soweto with people one day. I'd be dancing the gumboot dance in addition.

Ilizwi is a musical production by the Casterbridge Music Development Academy. It's directed by Vuyo Jack and Ingrid Wylde. Learn more about Ilizwi here. Ilizwi means "voice" in Xhosa. The musical told a great story ...

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Gata Misteriosa and Lee Bass (the Mozambican-Portuguese-Ghanaian-German duo who go by the name of Gato Preto) dropped this new video for "Pirao" last night: no longer strictly kuduro, not yet sure what to call it, but right in time for our weekend special of ten. Janka and the Bubu Gang (Sierro Leone via Brooklyn) also surprised [...]

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Pankaj Mishra writing in the Guardian:

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With the gutting of foreign coverage by most U.S. newspapers and the need to populate infinite Web space with content, a new creature has emerged: the foreign affairs blogger. Max Fisher, who hosts the Washington Post's WorldViews page, is a leading exemplar of the species. Fisher's newsy nuggets are often low-priority zeitgeist items that may [...]

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The University of KwaZulu-Natal has announced that it will make isiZulu language classes compulsory for all first-year students from next year. This modest step, aimed at promoting multilingualism in South Africa, has been sharply criticised. Some have compared it to the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools in 1976 (a move [...]

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This is a guest post by Dr. Deirdre LaPin, co-author of Securing Development and Peace in the Niger Delta (Woodrow...

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Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.

Enough Project Fellow Hawa Salih is featured in this story "Escape to Obscurity," about life as a Darfuri refugee who has fled to America.

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via Afrofuturist Affair:

Eaten By The Heart is a video installation and documentary project conceived, produced and directed by Zina Saro-Wiwa. Commissioned by The Menil Collection, Houston and supported by the Houston Museum of African American Culture for the Menil's exhibition The Progress of Love, the piece explores intimacy, heartbreak and love performances among Africans and Diasporans. Eaten By The Heart forms part of Zina's video performance and installation practice which focuses on the mapping of emotional landscapes, its resulting performative behaviors and cross-cultural implications. Zina states:

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News in the Congo has been surprisingly M23-deficient in the past few days. A group of Mai-Mai attacked Beni yesterday, killing several Congolese army officers (although their commander Hilaire has links well- to the M23); Kinshasa prepares for the visit of the United Nations Secretary-General and the head of the World Bank next week; and the country awaits a new head of the election commission (Appollinaire Malu Malu is the favorite, but his Catholic church seems opposed).

Is this because Kampala is dead? It would seem so--the negotiations have been on hold for weeks now, and the M23 has withdrawn, it says, until there is an official ceasefire. It suffices to look at the various proposals on the table there at the moment to see how far apart the two sides are.

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